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A leading Palestinian Arab professor and a group of 30 of his students are at the heart of a fierce controversy after they dared to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau in order to learn more about the Nazi Holocaust against the Jewish people.

Israeli-Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reports for the Gatestone Institute that Prof. Mohammed Dajani (pictured) of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem has long been criticized for trying to “normalize” relations between Arabs and Jews.

For many, Dajani taking a group of his students to the Nazi death camps was the last straw.

Palestinian media by-and-large condemned Dajani and those who joined him on the trip, and many commenters on Internet-based news outlets echoed that sentiment, many going as far as to accuse Dajani of treason and collaboration with the enemy.

Al-Quds University was quick to distance itself from the Auschwitz trip, insisting that it had not authorized Dajani to arrange such an outing.

The Palestinian Authority did its best to remain mum on the issue, likely not wanting to create further international controversy by taking a hostile position vis-a-vis the Holocaust, but also not wanting to further anger Palestinians by appearing to condone Dajani’s actions.

What was clear in the whole fiasco is that the Palestinian Authority has been very successful in its decades-long effort to educate new generations of Palestinians to view the Jews as their enemy, and to be suspicious of any topic that would paint the Jews in a sympathetic light.